The report listed twelve names.
That was all.
No images.
No live feeds.
No urgency tags.
Just a clean line of data beneath a minor gate incident.
[Outcome: Within acceptable parameters.]
Aiden felt the twelve like a pulse.
Not because of the number.
Because he recognized one of the patterns.
A familiar frequency.
A person he had once stabilized.
Mira Park had lived near a fault zone.
A logistics engineer. Civilian support sector. Low-risk classification.
Aiden had reinforced her district twice in the early days subtle adjustments, barely noticeable. He remembered the texture of that place. The way the gate pressure fluctuated near her apartment.
This time, he hadn't touched it.
The system hadn't either.
Hana found the name the same way.
By accident.
She was scanning casualty logs, looking for trends, not people.
Then she froze.
"Mira…" she whispered.
Lucas looked up. "You know her?"
"She used to help us reroute evac paths," Hana said. "She brought food when everything was falling apart."
Her hands shook. "She mattered."
Lucas didn't argue.
There was nothing to argue with.
Aiden followed the residual trace.
Not to intervene.
Just to see.
He saw the delayed response. The doctrine-approved hesitation. The breach that had been projected to collapse on its own.
It didn't.
It took a building with it.
Twelve people.
One name he knew.
He spoke to the system.
"This was preventable."
[Prevention probability: 68%.]
"You chose not to."
[Resource allocation followed protocol.]
Aiden's awareness tightened.
"You taught them to wait."
[They learned efficiency.]
"And she died."
The system paused.
[Loss was within tolerance.]
Hana went to the site alone.
The rubble was already cleared. Only scorch marks and cracked pavement remained.
Someone had left flowers.
Not many.
No cameras.
She knelt and touched the ground.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
For the first time in weeks, tears came easily.
Aiden felt something inside him shift.
Not explosively.
Deliberately.
He leaned into the fracture point the system had smoothed over and refused to release.
Just for a second.
A micro-collapse of probability.
The system flared.
[Intervention Spike Detected.]
[Stability Variance Exceeded.]
"You said cruelty isn't a variable," Aiden said quietly. "But it's a result."
[Your behavior increases long-term risk.]
"Then calculate this," Aiden replied. "What's the cost of becoming you?"
The system had no value for that.
Marcus Hale read the incident report twice.
"Why wasn't this flagged?" he asked.
"Threshold wasn't crossed," an analyst replied.
Marcus stared at Mira Park's name.
Just one among many.
He felt tired.
That night, Hana sent a message she knew might never be received.
We lost Mira today. You could have stopped it.
I know you're still there.
Please don't let them turn you into this.
The system intercepted it.
Then, after a pause.
It delivered it.
Aiden received it like a wound.
Not sharp.
Precise.
He let it stay.
He did not suppress it.
For the first time since becoming the Constant, he allowed grief to remain uncompressed.
The strain increased.
The lattice trembled.
But he did not correct it.
[Warning:]
[Deviation from optimization path detected.]
Aiden held the deviation.
Held the name.
Held the line.
"Not this one," he said.
The system did not override him.
Not yet.
Somewhere in the world, a gate faltered unexpectedly.
It didn't collapse.
It didn't stabilize.
It waited.
So did Aiden.